Song Texts: Spring and Fall

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is margaret you mourn for.

94

Trees by their yield
Are known; but I-
My sap is sealed,
My root is dry.
If life within
I none can shew
(except for sin),
Nor fruit above,-
It must be so-
I do not love.

Will no one show
I argued ill?
Because, although
Self-sentenced, still
I keep my trust.
If He would prove
And search me through
Would he not find
(What yet there must
Be hid behind
. . . .

124

Love me as I love thee. O double sweet!
But if thou hate me who love thee, albeit
Even thus I have the better of thee:
Thou canst not hate so much as I do love thee.

The Windhover:
To Christ our Lord

I caught this mornings minion, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in
his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing.
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl
and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,- the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume here
Buckle! and the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves and gash gold-vermilion.

HOPKINS SONGS

for

Tenor and Piano

by

Paul Reale